🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <37dcecaf.906773451@localhost> gae@eLsworthy.com (George Alan Esworthy) writes:
   >>There are three good reasons why Americans shouldn't give a rat's rear
   >>end what Noam Chomsky has to say:

This is ad hominem.
There was a real issue here.
It was East Timor.
Good ideas don't become ignorable just because Noam Chomsky is
speaking them.  I didn't retreat from intervention in Kosovo just
beacuse it was the first time I'd ever been on the same side 
as Jesse Helms.

   >>1.  He's a virulent anti-American ideologue.

That's bullshit.  Given that your net worth is in fewer than
seven figures, you and every American poorer than you would
be a hell of a lot better off if his ideology  (as opposed to
your own) were pragmatically empowered.  Anything that generally
benefits this large a fraction of Americans cannot be anti-American,
ideologically or otherwise.

 :   >1a.  He's virulently against many American policies.
 :
 :   1a'.  He's virulently against American society and institutions in
 :   general,

Only to the extent that America has generally been racist, sexist,
capitalist, and bigotedly exploitative.  There is also
a strong egalitarian and unviersalist-liberation strain in our
founding ideals and even occasionally in our jurisprudence.
Noam Chomsky is no more anti-American in general than chemotherapy
is anti-human in general.

 :  and in particular US foreign relations when the US is
 :   intervening against Marxist or other communist conflicts 

Of course.  As are ALL intelligent people of good will.
Big surprise.

 : but not the other way around,

When has there ever been an other way around?
When has the US ever intervened on behalf of a people
seeking freedom from economic or ethnic oppression?
I don't recall our intervening in S. Africa.  In 1939 Germany,
we not onl didn't intervene, we rejected boatloads of refugees.
America has gotten a lot of these wrong.

 : free enterprise when it interferes with his preference 
 : for equality of outcome regardless of value, advertising by
 :   corporations but not by left-wing or anarchist political
 :   organizations, and it goes on from there.  

This is a bunch of false analgoies.
You cannot place a value on getting a child educated.
It cannot be the case that it is inherently of greater value
to educate one child than another.  "Regardless of value" is
irrelevant when dealing with bigots such as yourself who
don't know how to compute value in the first place.

Advertising by people who wrongly came to own what was constitutionally
required to remain a public resource until the public was paid what
it was worth, or by corporations  who have exploited lying court
decisions to escape the consequences of their actions (something you
deplore in your "personal responsiblity" role), is not on an ethical
or judicial par with people just trying to get the public exposed to
a viewpoint.

 : His positions on so many
 :   issues are so well known and critical of the US social, economic, and
 :   political culture that it is quite fair to characterize his positions
 :   as anti-American.

I suppose you characterize your doctor as anti-you for
calling you sick, too, don't you?
People who are trying to get this country to live up to its
OWN professed values and ideals are not anti-American.  You are.


   >>2.  He's an unapologetic Stalin-supporting communist.

 :   2a'. I   stand corrected.  He was/is an anti-Stalinist.  
 :  He IS, however, an unapologetic Marxist when it doesn't 
 : bump into his anarchism.

Define "Marxist".

 :  That  alternates with his unapologetic anarchism when 
 :  it doesn't bump into  his Marxism.

There is no alternating and bumping going on here.
Left libertarianism is a coherent philosophy of 
political economy and public ethics.  URLs are available.
The web is a tremendous resource.

 :   3a'.  He writes for those who are already lying with him in his
 :   ideological bed.  He is remarkably unpersuasive for those with other,
 :   more rational and realistic, approaches to human relations.

You and those in your ideological bed don't know jack about
rationality.  You're winning big, realistically, for the
moment, but realisitcally, how big are you winning, when
you are NOT one of the 5% of Americans (not to mention an
equinumerous group of non-Americans) that controls so much
of our wealth, that gets to do what it WANTS to with its
time as opposed to what the overseer requires?  OK, so you
are the same color as they are.  You vote in the same party
as they do.  You value your role as an electoral soldier
in keeping the society from empowering poorer and browner
people.   But how rational is that, really, long-term?